Deng, pulled his country from North Korean-style despotism to comfortable middle class suburbia by sprinkling a little free market dust around.

While Deng was being shot at, Milton Friedman (liberal economist du jour) whose number of assassination attempts surprisingly clock in at zero (!) often acclaimed free markets as being fundamental to an individual's freedom - something which is lost on those of us who grew up in a post cold war generation.

A generation after the cold war ended, Chinese stock markets which are fundamentally democratic in nature are squaring off against the most powerful autocrat on the planet - Xi Jinping.

Part of the issue is that Chinese stocks are mostly walled off from the outside world, and owned by Chinese middle classes. Serious losses impact ordinary Chinese people.

Paternalistic governments want to avoid their people from harming themselves and therefore will try to intervene for the wider good.